Plus what you leave in and out of the "safe" profile makes for a very interesting info ;)
Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
161–170 of 228 posts
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#162To be effective, this would need to become a kind of norm for overseas travelers, the same way traveler's checks used to be. The idea would be that just as you don't carry a bag with your birth certificate, stock certificates, property titles, and jewelry with you, you also don't carry a 10 year archive of every email you've ever sent or a detailed list of every person you've ever spoken to. In particular, it needs t…
>even in the happiest timeline we could have ended up on after 2016 I'm not really sure why you mentioned this, did something bad happen?
Lots of people seem to be bemoaning 2016 as The Worst Year Evarrr or something.
I am not in that camp and I have my objections to it. But, in this case, I think the sentiment is reasonable wrt the topic at hand, basically.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the border agent takes your phone outside? It would go something like: > Tell me your password > OK, not sit here while I go out to unlock your phone.
I doubt that border agents will want to walk every phone outside and then come back in. It is security through inconvenience. But I guess there could be an option to extend the range of the original airport geofence.
(I suspect there's companies already trying to sell them that technology...)
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. But the practical alternative right now is doing nothing.
Fair enough! There are many good ideas here and I'll even wager that a 'trip mode' of some sort could even produce benefits outside of the held-at-the-border use case. It really does seem silly at retrospect that these tech giants have decided the default needed to be "expose all of the connections"
In fact, the border case is just an edge case. You also want your accounts protected if you lose your unlocked phone, have it stolen, have your password stolen, log in on a dodgy public computer, plug in an infected USB stick, or leave your laptop unattended in the wrong hotel room.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#165I think social media and gmail are a complete lost cause wrt privacy. I already de-activated my facebook due to it being a time sink. But I think I'll go ahead and delete it now.
One thing about Facebook culture is that the employees there see themselves as fanatical guardians of privacy. It's a very strange belief system, but it's real.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#166Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#167To be effective, this would need to become a kind of norm for overseas travelers, the same way traveler's checks used to be. The idea would be that just as you don't carry a bag with your birth certificate, stock certificates, property titles, and jewelry with you, you also don't carry a 10 year archive of every email you've ever sent or a detailed list of every person you've ever spoken to. In particular, it needs t…
>even in the happiest timeline we could have ended up on after 2016 I'm not really sure why you mentioned this, did something bad happen?
Read this as "even if had won the US election"
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#168What if the phone can be put into "suck mode" that just makes it completely infuriating to get any information from for a while after you've flown a long distance in a plane? Sure, you can open Facebook and stare at a loading icon until you give up. You can go to a profile page and see images that are failing to load. At some point you're going to stop wasting everyone's time. The reason this is better than just a "t…
I was going to say, this already exists on my phone. Any countermeasure on the device will just result in you being asked to log in on a CBP laptop.
Can you set up Facebook to require 2FA when you log in from a mysterious new device? And configure 2FA so it'll fail to reach you while you're traveling?
Edit: Actually, a sufficiently robust Suck Mode would make 2FA impossible. And I think all you have to do to get there is configure your cell network settings wrong, set Boingo Wireless as the top Wi-Fi SSID to connect to, and not pay for Boingo.
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>In particular, it needs to be normal enough that a significant fraction of all travelers do it. Yes, exactly. Border agents are trained to look for anything out of the ordinary. Currently, using a feature like this would immediately raise a huge red flag and encourage more questioning, detention and possibly even deportation based on the person's country of origin and the mood of the border agent. Incidentally, tha…
Right, the idea is that US travelers would kick-start the norm by travel-locking their accounts; they're at little risk while traveling. It might take many months or even years before travel locks were normed enough that at-risk travelers could rely on them, but that just means we should get started on these features sooner than later.
Couldn't US CBP defeat that norm for non-citizens, just by announcing "don't enable travel lock until after you clear customs, or you may not be allowed in" in the same way that they eg. tell you not to bring your codeine with you?
Citizens are probably OK, at least until they bring in Exit Visas...
Re: Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
#170What if the phone can be put into "suck mode" that just makes it completely infuriating to get any information from for a while after you've flown a long distance in a plane? Sure, you can open Facebook and stare at a loading icon until you give up. You can go to a profile page and see images that are failing to load. At some point you're going to stop wasting everyone's time. The reason this is better than just a "t…
I was going to say, this already exists on my phone. Any countermeasure on the device will just result in you being asked to log in on a CBP laptop.
2FA, for services that support it, with the second factor being a device that isn't with you when cross the border would be a solution that would be near absolute in prevention of logging in at the border, whether from your own device or a CBP-controlled device (of course, it wouldn't prevent you from any consequences CBP applies to not logging in.)
Of course, there's a question of the risk to that device, which somehow has to cross the border separate from you, which creates its own ream of problems (you could protect the access to that device with 2FA that uses the device you do keep with you, which mitigates the security risk of loss, but you still risk losing access to the services it protects if it is lost in transit; obviously, you want to make sure your 2FA has a recovery process and one that isn't usable from arbitrary locations or the device you carry across the border, but will be usable by you when you get home, at least.)